01 TONY IOMMI IN HIS OWN WORDS
The legendary Black Sabbath guitarist spoke to TG’S Paul Elliott and explained how he learned to play with missing fingertips, how he writes the heaviest riffs known to man, and why ‘widdly’ guitar leaves him cold.
DJANGO REINHARDT SAVED MY LIFE
“When I had my factory accident and I cut the ends of my fingers off, I thought, that’s it. I was at home moping about, thinking, ‘I can’t play anymore’. I was devastated. And the manager of the factory came to see me. He said, ‘I’ve got an EP here I want to play for you, it’s by Django Reinhardt, can you listen to it?’ I said, ‘No, no, I don’t want to listen to any music.’ He said, ‘Please, just let me play it.’ And he played it and I said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s great.’ And then he told me the story about Django Reinhardt losing his fingers. And it really did encourage me. I thought, ‘God, somebody’s done it, and it really got me on my feet to start playing again and trying to work out how to play gypsy-style jazz. He was a great player. Him and Stéphane Grappelli were really good. And really, Django was so important to me.”
PLAYING BY EAR
“I would have liked to have not chopped the ends of my fingers off! It became a burden. Some people say it helped me invent the kind of music I play, but I don’t know whether it did. It’s just something I’ve had to deal with. I had to learn to live with it. It affects your playing style – you can’t feel the strings, you have to do it by ear. And there are certain chords I can’t play. Right at the beginning I was told by doctors to stop playing. But I believed I could do it, and I did. They told me, ‘You won’t be playing guitar.’ I proved them wrong!”
THE ART OF THE RIFF
“I’m always writing. I don’t really do anything else. The studio room I write in at home, it’s dark, it could be day or night in there, you don’t know. And I’m always putting ideas down, not even thinking that this could be for Sabbath or whatever. I just get them down. A good riff is a good riff, and you use it accordingly. And with most riffs, they just come out. Even now, I can usually come up with a few riffs in an hour. But I don’t overdo it. It has to feel right.”
EDDIE VAN HALEN
“When Sabbath went on tour in 1978 and took Van Halen with us, I think that was the nail in the coffin for us. Van Halen were so full of energy and we were falling to pieces. It was difficult for us, the band was going through a funny stage and it felt like the end. But I liked having Van Halen with us. Eddie became a great friend of mine on that tour. I used to get together with him every night in my room or his.”
BLUES AND JAZZ
“With Sabbath, we were very much bluesbased when we started, and when we talked to Rick Rubin about him producing the 13 album, he spoke about going back to those blues roots. He was trying to capture that moment again of how we’d done stuff and how I’d played. And I went more with that approach on that album. There were also some jazz influences in places. On one track, Zeitgeist, I did a jazzy solo. I like jazz guitar players, and I liked to play some jazzy things in the early days when we first started. So it’s sort of bluesy-jazzy. And there was a track that was just a blues jam... called Blues Jam. The title sort of gives it away, really! We had the basic riff, an idea of what we were going to do, but then it became a jam on that riff, then into a jammed solo, then we’d nod to each other where to go. We enjoy a bit of nodding... And that’s how that song was, with no tight-ups with drums or anything. It was ajam and we made it into a song.”
IT’S ALLABOUT FEEL
“In the past, when Sabbath played with bands like Yes, technically they were all great. We weren’t technically great, but we had something that we built up together, we made a sound that was great. Metallica have that. They sound like a band. They’ve got a great attitude, and they love what they do. But with other bands, when you hear all this widdly guitar stuff, it doesn’t really mean anything. It doesn’t have that feel. I’m old fashioned. For me, it has to have feel.”